Forget You(17)
Author: Jennifer Echols

What if we’d done it? I was on the pill. I reached into the drawer nearest the bathtub to check and, sure enough, I’d taken my pill yesterday like a good girl. Right after my seventeenth birthday, my mom had suggested I get on the pill. At the time I didn’t bother to tell her she had nothing to worry about.

Now she did. God bless the pill. But that wouldn’t protect me against a venereal disease. Surely Brandon had used a condom again. I wouldn’t have let him do it otherwise. I hadn’t hit my head and gone crazy until the wreck after.

The more I invented worst-case scenarios and dismissed them logically, the more deflated I felt. Catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant because of something Brandon had done to me would be the end of me. Y the idea seemed so normal and teenage and, dared I say, romantic

et compared with everything else going wrong in my life just then. Comforting. I was scaring myself.

Reboot, reboot, reboot. I sank deeper into the water and massaged myself again. Testing for tenderness gave way to making myself feel better. It helped with my headache. I forgot all about my headache and Brandon as I opened for Doug. He slipped his hands into my jeans and explored me with his fingers, and finally took me there in the wet grass.

I STEPPED FROM THE BATHTUB WITH a smaller headache (marble-sized) and a resolution to stop being so screwed up.

After drying my hair (which still didn’t cover the bruise very well), putting on makeup (which did), inserting fresh contact lenses, and pulling on dry clothes, I sat on the living room sofa, waiting for my dad and Ashley to leave. As I painted my fingernails, I brainstormed for ways I could find out exactly what I’d done last night without revealing the extent of my amnesia and getting myself committed.

I would ask around carefully. If that didn’t work, I would hope Doug wasn’t out to get me after all, and admit to him that I’d lost my memory not just of the wreck but of the whole night. If, and only if, I exhausted all my other possibilities, I would trust him with this.

I smudged the paint on that fingernail and had to remove it and start over.

And otherwise, I would keep my own counsel. In middle school I dreaded the rare times I rode somewhere in the car alone with my dad. He wouldn’t say a word the whole time. Maybe I remembered it wrong (and I sure wouldn’t place any bets based on my memory now ), but it seemed we’d gotten along fine when I was little. He wasn’t home much, but on weekends he would play with me. Swim with me in the ocean, before we built this new house with a pool. Lie on his back in the sand, balance me on his feet raised above his head, and let me play airplane.

Something happened when I was in grade school–the opening of Slide with Clyde, I suppose–and suddenly he was in a bad mood all the time. My mom would say that unlike her, unlike me, he was a quiet person. He didn’t want or need to talk out his observations about life or his problems. He kept his own counsel. I resented him for that. But considering that my mom had gone insane, it wasn’t wise to continue along her path. I would keep my own counsel from now on.

And I would get started on my investigation, asking Keke and Lila what happened, if my dad and Ashley would hurry up and leave already. Waving my fingernails in the air to dry them, I glanced up at the cameras every ten seconds. There was no reason for the cameras to irk me. No one would be watching me but my dad. Like he said, it would be as if he were here in the house with me. And I’d never done anything to alarm a parent anyway. Except have sex with Brandon.

But now, with the cameras rolling, I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to take advantage of my dad leaving me alone for a week. I wanted to throw a wild party, roll a joint on the cutting board in the kitchen, make love to Brandon on my dad’s bed. Anything bad. I wanted to make out with Doug right here on the sofa where he’d sat an hour ago. It still smelled faintly like him, of chlorine and sea.

Finally they came downstairs. My dad’s arms were full of Ashley’s luggage as he blustered through the room, but I called to him anyway. I had to take care of myself and my own needs, because clearly nobody else was going to. "Dad, if I get an insurance check in the mail while you’re gone, can I shop around for another car?"

"Y owe me out of that check," he said. "I paid to have your car towed to the junkyard from the road into town."

I filed away this information: he’d just told me where the wreck happened. And I nodded, trying not to make waves. "I’m pretty sure I can get another classic Bug for the same price as the first."

"Absolutely not," he said. "No Bug."

I looked to Ashley. She looked out to sea. She couldn’t see it through the living room wall, but she looked in that direction.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Y ou’re not buying another heap," he said. "That Bug had no air bag. The aftermarket seat belts broke on impact. That’s how you got so banged up in the first place." He gestured to my forehead. "Next time you’ll be dead."

I realized I’d been rubbing my head. I put my hand down, took a deep breath, and asked reasonably, "If you want me to use my own money for a car but you won’t let me buy an old car I can afford, what do you expect me to drive?"

He shrugged. "Y can drive my Mercedes next week while I’m gone. Next summer you can work again and add to your money."

"And in the meantime? How am I supposed to get around? Is Ashley going to homeschool me?" Never let the jury see how angry you are. My mom had taught me that. Never let them see you lose your cool. However, my mom did not argue cases in court while people whacked her in the head with marbles.

Ashley laughed. "I’m sure it will all work out," she said, patting my dad’s butt to scoot him on out the door. He had to make a second trip upstairs to carry down all her luggage. They were lucky to fit everything in her Beamer. In the end Ashley seemed fonder of me than she’d ever been before, while my dad glared at me like it was my fault he had to worry about me dropping dead from brain damage, thus ruining his vacation. I wanted to reassure him that when I started school a few weeks ago, I’d listed only my mom as an emergency contact. If I dropped dead at school, they wouldn’t have a phone number for my dad anyway.

I decided to let him sweat it. I kept my own counsel. Cheerfully I waved good-bye and best wishes to them as Ashley executed a seventeen-point turn in the courtyard and sped through the gate. Then I sank onto a teak bench on the porch and called Keke and Lila.

***

"WHERE WERE MIKE AND DOUG HEADED when you hit each other?" Lila asked from the backseat as Keke sped their rusty Datsun through the warm morning. Hitching a ride with them was the best way I could think of to reconstruct last night. They could take me by Brandon’s for a visit and debriefing. Then I’d go with them to the swim meet and grill the team about what happened, though I wouldn’t compete. And I didn’t think I should drive myself. The headache was still marble-sized, but I felt like I was standing on marbles too. I might lose my balance at any second.